Re: [bug-mailutils] Configuring debug in imap4d.rc

[Chris Hall]

Hi, Sergey,

And thanks once again for such a thoughtful, helpful and thorough
explanation.

On 06/09/2012 02:40 AM, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> This can happen if you specify an URL where it does not belong. The
> rule of thumb is: URLs are for Mailutils, paths for anything else.
> That is, specifying homedir "mbox:///home/${user}/mail/mailboxes"; #
> Wrong! will lead to the above error message, because chdir(2) never
> understood (and, hopefully, never will) anything but pathnames. The
> correct way is: homedir "/home/${user}/mail/mailboxes"; 
Ya, I figured that out, before I sent the email, but I forgot to change
that bit -- my bad, sorry!
> Like that: debug-level "mailbox.prot,!trace6"; 
I thought I'd tried that, but maybe I left the ';' or something.  Okay,
makes sense to see it like that!

> you won't see the debugging output, because numerically debug < info.
> To see it, change the above to:
>    
>    mail.debug                  -/var/log/maillog

Ah, Thanks!  All these years that I've been setting up, administering
and debugging my servers, all the articles and books I've read and
people I've talked with, I had no idea about syslog.conf. 

*Extremely* useful information, I'm embarrassed I didn't know that, and
happy that now I do -- I intend to read extensively on such an important
facility.

> in other words, you are trying to open a directory as a mailbox. There
> are two mailbox formats that keep the messages in a directory: maildir
> and mh. Now, in one of your earlier posts (Message-ID:
> <address@hidden>), you wrote:

Yes, although my misunderstanding comes from a slightly different direction.

Back when I was using 2.9.96, having problems with STARTTLS, I installed
Dovecot IMAP as a temporary measure so I could proceed with developing
my RSS->Email process.  While installing, I configured a non-standard
backend setup I found on Dovecot wiki that allows to put mail items in
intermediate directiories, e.g., in hierarchy 'RSS/DWelle/ I could store
items in both 'RSS' and in 'DWelle'.  To do this, Dovecot allows one to
subscribe to the directory name, but every directory has an mbox file
with a specific name that actually contains the messages. The Dovecot
backend, when configured appropriately, manages this transparently.

Using imap4d 2.99.97 with the improved STARTTLS support, my
misunderstanding when I tried to configure imap4d to use the same
directory hierarchy was an (uninformed) assumption that IMAP as a
standard includes the backend implementation, i.e. the storage
mechanism, when that is apparently not at all the case (I understand
that one could, if one really wanted, implement a relational
database/SQL backend, carrier-pigeon backend ;) or whatever, for an IMAP
frontend.)

I now understand that if I rearrange and rename properly (and make a
minor alteration to my maidag.scm filing proc) I can move my existing
files into a structure that imap4d will happily use.

Its actually pretty easy to do this, so that is what I am doing, since
I'd prefer having an all GNU Mailutils solution, for ease of
administration and debugging, (now I know how!), if for no other
reason.  Dovecot IMAP server has a nice feature for /very/ large IMAP
installations using mbox as a backend: it seems to automatically index
all the mbox file contents for speed of search and retrieval.  But I
don't expect that feature to be noticeably useful, necessary or cost
effective for my particular installation anytime soon, if ever.

Thanks for your time and patience.

Sincerely,

Chris